CreaseAndAssist

Maybe not, they have almost no cap space. Iowa has crushed Rockford in a few AHL pre-season games. Looks like they will have plenty of firepower there with Sammy Walker, Vinni Lettieri and Nic Petan to supplement the bunch of young prospects there. Jujhar Khaira will another interesting player to watch as he played pretty well in pre-season play. Caeden Bankier, Mikey Milne, Sam Hentges and Daemon Hunt are hurt to start the season. Wallstedt has been sharp. Hunter Haight and Riley Heidt off to fast starts in the OHL and WHL respectively. Vladislav Firstov and Danila Yurov also off to a good start in the KHL.

No one really seems to be doubting on Gustavsson so far, but it will be interesting to see if he is used more like a true NHL #1 goaltender than the rotation they mostly used last season until the playoffs. I would think Addison would be on a fairly short leash.

Wild won 4-3. Sammy Walker with 2 goals and a helper. Wallstedt had 40 saves. Daemon Hunt was close lined by a Tanner Kero hit. Alex Goligoski looked slow and old...and tired. Almost every time he and Simon Johansson were out there the Avs went on the attack and peppered Wallstedt with shots. Haight, Heidt and Walker was a pretty good line and continued the same chemistry they had at the prospect tournament last week. Khaira's big but he's pretty slow. Addison took a foolish retaliatory penalty in the 3rd, but luckily it didn't cost the team on the scoreboard.

Wild pre-season starts tonight with a group of youngsters go to Colorado to face the Avalanche. Wallstedt in net. Dewar, Khaira, Goligoski and Duhaime are there too.

I saw the 2nd one against the Chicago Blackhawks prospects minus Connor Bedard. Sammy Walker had a hat trick; but that top line of Walker, Riley Heidt and Hunter Haight was the best the Wild had in that scrimmage. They caused a lot of chaos and Haight and Heidt set up Walker for some nice finishes. Heidt is really good at stripping opponents of the puck. Rasmus Kumpulainen isn't the most fleet of foot, but he works hard and has better vision and instincts than I expected. He's going to play for Oshawa (OHL) this year which is why he was at the scrimmage. Carson Lambos looked really good; mobile and really involved all over the ice. I am not sure if he has a lot of offensive potential from a scoring perspective but he makes good passes and he can either carry it out of the zone or make a good first pass out of the zone. Kyle Masters also looked pretty good and he had two helpers too. Simon Johansson and Daemon Hunt were solid too. Ryan O'Rourke got into a fight but beyond that wasn't that noticeable as the other four guys I mentioned. The Wild were using invitee players between the pipes in the game against Chicago. Wallstedt played in the Wild's 5-1 loss to the Blues prospects.

Episode #22: Something To Prove In this episode, @MNSOTA and Kalisha and I discuss which players have the most to prove this season, we also talk about Calen Addison's new deal and what will be expected of him moving forward as well as answering listener questions too! Check it out! If you would like to participate you can ask a question here or Tweet / Post at us on X and we'll answer.

Remember the Wild Employee of the Month club that was the rotating captaincy? Oh those were the days! Alex Henry a captain to start the year? Yea, we can see they don't care who they give it too!

(shrugs) I'll believe it when I see it. Iowa doesn't have a lot of firepower and most of what it had last year is probably going to be with the big club this year (Rossi, Beckman). They will have more prospects playing the major roles so they will have a chance to show if they can sink or swim right away.

HFBoards was mostly made up of folks who couldn't trade barbs with the people on the old wild.com boards. So if you migrated over there; they gave those of us they didn't like a real hard time and more or less banned you for any reason at all. I got a one-month suspension for saying James Sheppard was going to be a bust. Seriously, a hockey opinion...nothing personal towards anyone unless you were James Sheppard. And James Sheppard was a total bust...so... Either way, I think I remember Sudden Death and little or nothing happening there after Metroboards dissolved. Metroboards was where I was 'discovered' and asked to start blogging. I remember the fantasy league and decent discussions to be had over there. Moderation done right can be great to keep it lively but its a fine line before it becomes the group-think gestapo. I remember on some of the old NHL team boards, like the Hurricanes board about the only thing they allowed was opinions that spoke favorably of the team and the organization. Anything remotely like criticism you'd get a DM discussing how you will be suspended if you try to stir up trouble. All it could take is saying Cam Ward didn't have a good game and you were on their 'watch list.' If I remember correctly, members couldn't start a thread until you had 100+ posts and you even had a 'warning meter', my Cam Ward opinion earned me two out of my ten warning points for the month. It was crazy. While I think you might find a few sharp hockey minds over at HFboards, I think you see even more people who simply THINK they are great hockey minds but have just as much credentials as your average fan.

Episode #21: Will They, or Won't They? In this episode, @MNSOTA and Kalisha and I discuss the sad saga that is the Arizona Coyotes, a (lame) Wild rumor and prognosticate what Calen Addison's future with the team looks like at this point (still unsigned, etc). We also answer a bunch of listener questions too. Check it out!

(shrugs) AHL often has 3 games (Friday, Saturday, Sunday) for a lot of its teams to save travel costs. Rossi, being a major junior player was probably more used to that than say a Brock Faber would be. However, I wouldn't just chalk it up to travel as being the main culprit for Marco Rossi hitting a wall. Fatigue; physical, mental and emotional is probably a more likely source...but either way, he wasn't delivering for Iowa when it needed him the most the last two seasons.

Wait a sec, I thought if you just got the horse to train a bit they'd be ready to win the Triple Crown after racing at Canterbury for a few weeks?!?! Are you saying that's not true? (gasp) In all of my years of watching the Iowa Wild, they rarely ever appeared to be the more talented, faster team. Tim Army helped make them a hard-working, blue collar kind of team...but they normally looked out skilled by our opponent's best players / lines. Goaltenders often had to be stellar just for them to have a chance as offense was usually a struggle and that was even with Marco Rossi in the lineup. While Brett McLean will be a fresh voice, he will have a lot of young players on the back end and some new faces up front in their 1st pro seasons. That normally means lots of growing pains rather than on-ice domination.

I am not sure I buy that logic, because if that were true then a lot more guys from Quinnipiac should've received NHL opportunities. They didn't. Every league has its ringer who can dominate at that level but you promote them to a higher level their game, style, etc just doesn't deliver. Faber's, at least from our small sample size of the playoffs looks promising and he has always demonstrated a lot of poise. However, he will feel the grind of travel and playing 60+ games in a season for the first time in his career. Sammy Walker certainly hit that wall after a fast start with Iowa last year. It's a big adjustment from being two-game weekend warrior to 3-4 games every 5-6 days.

I know Tony, we've talked several times but even he knows its put up or shut up time with Marco Rossi. He loves analytics so much he primarily sticks with the metrics. If he is a good as the analytics crowd wants you to believe then why wasn't he leading Iowa beyond their play in series last year or beyond the 1st round the season before that? I don't see how Rossi was held back from doing just that in Iowa. He had all of the prime ice time and opportunity to lead the way. Why would I or anyone expect him to just flip a switch and dominate at the NHL level when he didn't do it at the AHL level?

The organization continues to do the same thing and hopes for a different result, so I wouldn't get your hopes up.

I agree. Rarely has he team had momentum going into the post-season only to get bounced right away. 'Wait til' next season' might as well be this organization's permanent slogan. Cory Pronman of the Athletic rated the Wild's prospect pool 10th and that was in a grouping that included Matt Boldy and Brock Faber as prospects. The Wild homers tripped over themselves saying Pronman is a Wild hater for saying the team has lots of forwards with skating issues and a big crop of 6'0" puck moving defenseman that have limited offensive potential. Screams Stanley Cup contender to me...:rolleyes:

(yawn) Until it shows itself on the ice, I'm growing tired of these articles. Honestly, we are sounding more and more like the Minnesota Twins each day.

@IllaZilla You and I have have been saying this for years. Wild have been in denial about a rebuild and the salary cap crunch should've made this an easy pivot instead they resist and we only delay the inevitable and just cement more years of mediocrity. I think he keeps delaying a rebuild because the owner lives in this ridiculous fantasy world that this team needs to pretend its trying to contend each year.

Rossi does provide some built in excuses (Myocarditis, the lost season, etc) but he's had time to develop and this team needs him to be ready to make an impact. He's a Top 10 pick on a team that rarely gets to select from that part of the draft and as a center this team desperately needs him to live up to that potential / hype, because if not it will be a major setback. I think I said this earlier in this thread, but this is a big year not just for Guerin IMO where you start to see if Rossi and maybe others have what it takes to make the next step but its also big for Judd Brackett. Brackett who was heralded needs to start showing tangible signs that he can mine talent for this team that will actually be a difference maker. So far, none of his selections have made an impact yet. It doesn't matter that publications and 'experts' chime in saying you have a top prospect pool, until it makes a difference on the ice for the Wild it's just that...words and nothing more.

I was pretty ambivalent. Either way, I think this summer proved that Matt Dumba didn't exactly draw a ton of interest. $3.9M is far more than I would've paid him, and in a strange way our salary crunch helped us avoid making that kind of salary mistake. He already had a house in Arizona so I guess this 'move' is fairly easy for him and he still has a house in Minnesota too in case anyone cares about stuff like that. Arizona has been in this cycle of rebuilding, etc for a decade. They might be better next year but good enough to make the playoffs?!?! Not so sure; although I am not sure we're good enough either. Certainly not good enough to do much of anything if we do make the playoffs. Can Dumba rediscover his game? Not likely. I heard he kept things loose in the locker room and was well-liked, but 'ok' defense and an offensive game that more or less disappeared certainly wasn't worth $6M a season anymore. If anything, his fight should be a cautionary tale for young players who decide to oblige a lame request to fight by a player who is going to talk trash no matter if you kick his ass or not. Chris Stewart was never the same after he broke his hand on Kyle Brodziak's helmet and was resigned to being an energy player instead of the promising power forward he was prior to that ill-advised fight. In thinking about Dumba's whole career with the Wild, he was a classic teaser. Where at times he showed us some of the offense and physical play we were sold on when he was drafted, but it was never quite enough. The big shot was more like Happy Gilmore where he'd blast it but it seemed to miss the net or was easily blocked. His defensive lapses and gaffes with the puck in his own zone often seemed to counter those moments where he'd make a great offensive play; you seemed to get 5 atrocious mistakes to one great play. Then when he seemed to kind of put it all together, just as suddenly it was gone. I think he was a very good citizen, but at the end of the day that's not really what matters most in professional sports. I'm sure he'll come back and do interviews and tell us funny Jonas Brodin and Marcus Foligno stories someday.

It will be interesting to see if Guerin starts defending Rossi the way he did Dumba. Where he feels people are counting him out and whether he'll ask people to stop being so vocal in their criticism of him. Just a bit of a prediction...

I agree. It would be a mistake to add Dumba again after this season even if he was making half of what he was making last year (so $3 million instead of $6 million) simply because you want the young ones (cheaper) to battle for those spots. As far as Addison goes, I don't think he's that special. Dan Boyle may have been about his height, but he had a lot more ability than Addison does on both sides of the puck. I think Addison can distribute the puck but I don't think he's a real dangerous threat to score and I don't think he defends particularly well. In my opinion, you can find players with that kind of M.O. all over the league and in any draft. Small mobile puck movers...with some offensive ability. Look at our prospect pool of defense prospects. Its full of around 6'0" puck mover guys who have some skill but are perhaps not going to be big scorers. I don't see why Addison is this indispensible prospect; maybe 2-3 years ago...but not so much now.

The fact people are getting pumped up for Yurov moving to center or being a viable center candidate continues to show how little faith they have in Rossi. Don't get me wrong, Yurov and Khusnutdinov and Ohgren are the forward prospects that seem to have the most potential. I can't wait to see them make the trip across the pond next year. (knock on wood)

I agree with @IllaZilla I don't think he's in a good position to play hardball with the Wild, the team has a ton of defensive prospects and his game isn't complete. Faber may not have as many points but he is a far better defender than Addison. No arbitration...so accept a $800k deal or sit.

Thanks again for listening! We really appreciate it. It was interesting to see the relative consensus on the Gustavsson deal; most people see it as a sensible contract.